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OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office

How does OpenOffice.org (OOo) compare with Microsoft Office (MSO)? The
question is harder to answer than you might expect. Few users have the
experience or patience to do a thorough comparison. Too often, they
miss features that have different names or are in different positions in
the editing window. Or, perhaps they overlook the fact that some features,
although missing in one,
easily can be added through customization.
Yet another problem when comparing something to MSO is which of the eight current
versions of MSO do you use for the comparison?

To cut through these difficulties, as I compared OpenOffice.org 3.1.1
and Microsoft Office 2007, I assumed until a search proved otherwise
that, if one office suite included a feature, the other also would have
it. I also focused on the three core applications: the word processors,
spreadsheets and presentation programs. The results suggest a close
feature match for average users, but in some cases, a clear choice for
expert users.

Navigating the Interface

In Office 2007, Microsoft implemented its Fluent User Interface (better
known as ribbons), replacing menus and taskbars with a combination
of both. By contrast, OOo still retains menus and taskbars. Both use
context-specific floating windows that open automatically when the cursor
is at a particular type of formatting. When ribbons first appeared,
they were both attacked and defended vigorously. Yet for all the effort,
no independent study has proven conclusively that ribbons are
easier or harder to use than the classic menus and taskbars. At first,
you may have to search for repositioned features, but neither has a clear
advantage once you adjust to it. Most users are likely to be exasperated
with the arrangement of features with the classic interface just as often
as they are with ribbons.

Much the same is true of the on-line help. With
MSO, users hoping for help have to drill down deep to find answers,
and the arrangement of topics by questions is both limiting and hard to
scan. With OOo, the problems with help are incompleteness and out
of date and poorly written entries, but the result is equally unfriendly,
even though the help system is more thorough.

As for the editing window,
one office suite needs only to implement a feature for the other one
to copy it. For instance, OOo borrows a zoom slider bar from MSO,
while MSO borrowed floating windows from OOo. And, although you can point
to areas where the interface of one is easier or more efficient, such
as the template selector in MSO or OOo's Navigator that allows you to
jump from feature to feature, these areas are counterbalanced by other
features in which each suite is at a disadvantage. Verdict:
tie.

The
interfaces vary in strengths and weaknesses, but neither stands out as
particularly well done. The main reason for preferring one interface
over another is that you are used to it.

Word Processors: OOo Writer vs. MSO Word

For casual users, Microsoft Word is extremely convenient. For every
feature, from templates and content pages to tables and bullets, Word
offers libraries of standard layouts. These libraries are not particularly
sophisticated by typographical standards. Some, like those for
tables of contents, are frankly an aesthetic disaster, but for those who
choose to ignore document design, they are good enough, especially in
documents that will be used once and then discarded.

By contrast, the rumor is
that OOo Writer's developers were required to use the word processor for
their own documentation. Whether the rumor is true is uncertain, but it
is true that Writer has more to offer for those who are concerned with
document design. Writer comes with very few layout libraries, leaving
you to download or create them, but in compensation, it allows you a
degree of control that makes it as much an intermediate layout program
as a word processor. Kerning, hyphenation, the exact positioning of
list bullets, headers, footers and footnotes or endnotes—all these
layout features can be set with far greater precision in Writer than in
Word.

To help you organize this precision, Writer is distinctly oriented
toward styles. As you may know, styles is a feature that allows you to
adjust formatting once, then apply the settings where needed, instead
of applying all the formatting manually each time you use it. Styles
really save time when you are making major changes to layout and when
saved into templates for re-use. Writer allows you to set styles for
paragraphs, characters, pages, lists and object frames. Even more
important, Writer is so oriented toward styles that even a simple
act like adding a page number generally requires them. Some features,
like outline numbering, are impossible without them. In comparison,
Word is far more oriented toward manual formatting.

Figure 1. MS Word

Figure 2. OpenOffice.org Writer

Although Word does include paragraph and character styles, you have
to seek them out if you want to use them. When you do locate styles,
you have to drill down into menus to change them, a process that is
decidedly more awkward than Writer's arrangement of tabs in a window. Nor
will you find the precision present in Writer's features. Rather than using
styles, most Word users, I suspect, would prefer to stick with its
layout libraries. In other words, Writer is more for advanced users,
and Word for beginners. Word's orientation in particular, is implicit
in the interface, which makes manual formatting tools easy to find and
styles just one feature among dozens. The orientation is implicit also
in the fact that advanced features like AutoText are so deeply buried,
many users still believe that they were dropped when ribbons
arrived. A corollary of the difference in orientation is that although
Writer is adequate for documents of hundreds of pages, few experienced
users ever would consider Word for documents of more than about 20
pages.

Despite the change in the interface, Word is still crash-prone at
greater lengths. Word does include a master document feature, just as
Writer does, but as one commenter said, files that use Word's master
document feature tend to be in one of two states—corrupted or about
to be corrupted. Verdict: Writer.

You have to do more initial work with
Writer to set up the templates you need, but once you do, the result
is more professional, precise and individual than with Word.

Spreadsheets: OOo Calc vs. MSO Excel

Calc and Excel have been in an arms race for years. Excel extends
the numbers of columns and rows it can support in one release, and
in the next, Calc matches it. Recent releases also have seen developers
improving Calc's speed when processing complex equations. Consequently,
both Calc and Excel now support spreadsheets that are so extensive,
any sane user would have switched from a spreadsheet to a database long
before bumping against the limitations. In much the same way, Calc
always has been careful to match Excel function for function to maximize
compatibility. In fact, Calc actually has several dozen more functions
than Excel, not because Calc can do more, but because it often maintains
two versions of the same function—one for compatibility with Excel
and one with extra features that Excel lacks. Given the sheer number of
functions in both spreadsheets, I cannot be completely certain that one
has functions the other lacks, but if either does, those functions
are specialized ones that average users are unlikely to miss.

For sorting
cell entries and manipulating formulae, Calc and Excel have a roughly
equivalent feature set. The main difference is in some of the
names—for instance, where Excel refers to “pivot tables”
and “trace precedents”,
Calc refers to “datapilots” and “detective”. With the basics so close,
the differences between Calc and Excel remain minor at best.

Figure 3. MS Excel

Figure 4. OpenOffice.org Calc

For example, pivot tables in Excel are easier to construct than Calc's
datapilots and easier to manipulate later, although the use of cell and page styles
in Calc makes formatting and printing easier. In the end, which application
you prefer depends on what extras matter to you. Most users are unlikely
to find any great difference in general functionality. Verdict:
tie.

Slideshows: OOo Impress vs. MSO PowerPoint

OOo Impress produces slideshows that serve the needs of most users. It
always has been especially strong in object animation, and because it
shares much of its code with OOo's Draw, it also is ideal for drawing
charts and diagrams. One particularly useful feature is the ability to
save object styles so that you easily can create copies and modify them
all. Yet, despite such features, Impress always has struggled
to catch up with MSO PowerPoint. Over its releases, it has narrowed
the gap, adding built-in support for movie and sound clips and more
recently tables. However, the gap remains in several key areas. For
example, although PowerPoint allows the recording of continuous narrations,
Impress is limited to adding sound clips to each screen. Similarly,
Impress lacks the ability to use the pointer to draw on the screen during
a presentation. If you want a Presenter View—a view that includes
notes that display on your machine but not on the projector—you have
to install the Sun Presenter Console extension in Impress. And, although
PowerPoint includes a set of collaboration features similar to those found
in Word, Impress's first step to match them is scheduled to arrive
in only OOo 3.2, when notes will be added.

Another weakness of Impress is that
it is divided into three panes: a slide pane, the current slide pane
and a task pane. This makes Impress almost impossible to use except in
a full-screen window. However, although PowerPoint occasionally opens
a task pane, in general, its ribbon interface means that it does not
usually need one. Verdict: PowerPoint.

Figure 5. MS PowerPoint

Figure 6. OpenOffice.org Impress

Other Features

Beyond the core applications, both MSO and OOo include other
programs. Both include a small database, although OOo's ability to connect
easily to other database sources gives it a slight edge. In some editions,
MSO includes Microsoft Outlook, a personal information manager; Visio,
a charting program; Publisher, a basic desktop layout program, and a
dozen more. The only other application in OOo is Draw, an SVG graphics
editor, but as free software, OOo can be supplemented by dozens of other
applications. Although these applications may not always interact well with
each other, neither do the components of MSO. And, at least an increasing
number of free software applications support OOo's Open Document Format,
which means that a document written in Writer can be opened in AbiWord
or KWord.

Yet another consideration is that, although MSO has an ecosystem
of dozens of trainers and instructional Web pages built around it,
instruction and resources for OOo are much scarcer. Conversely, OOo
has developed a community of extension writers that is second only to
Firefox's, while MSO's extensions are far fewer in number.

The Outcome

The fact that OpenOffice.org is free software predisposes me to prefer it.
However, until I completed the analysis, I had no idea what the results
would be. They ended (if you haven't been keeping score) with OOo
and MSO in a tie for general interface and spreadsheets, OOo in the
lead in word processors, and MSO ahead in slide presentations. What
these results suggest, I think, is that both office suites are mature
products. Given a moment's thought, that shouldn't be surprising, since
OOo's development goes back more than 20 years. But we tend to think
of OOo as a recent development, so the closeness of the comparison may
come as a bit of a surprise.

This is the fourth time I have compared the
two office suites. Each time, the differences between them have gotten
smaller. Now, they are less than ever before. For those of us in the
Free Software community, the latest results help to prove what we have
known all along: opting for free software does not mean being satisfied
with inferior tools. Of course, you might disagree with my conclusions,
depending on your needs and expertise. But what they emphasize, more
than anything else is that today free productivity apps can stand toe
to toe with their proprietary equivalents, and win as often as they lose.

Bruce Byfield is a computer journalist who covers free and open-source
software. He has been a contributing editor at Maximum
Linux and Linux.com,
and he currently is doing a column and a blog for Linux Pro
Magazine. His
articles appear regularly on such sites as Datamation, Linux
Journal and
Linux Planet. His article, “11 tips for moving to
OpenOffice.org” was the
cover
story for the March 2004 issue of Linux Journal.